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Abstract
The meaning of the American Civil War has been debated since its very beginning. The music of the war played a key role in the subsequent memorialization of the conflict, with two songs in particular serving as potent postwar symbols of the war’s purpose and legacy. Though set to the same tune and containing highly compatible antislavery messages, “John Brown’s Body” and the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” came to represent increasingly divergent understandings of the Civil War, namely those of emancipationism and reconciliationism. Though both songs remained highly popular in the decades immediately following the war’s end, the ideological malleability of the “Battle Hymn” enabled it to be continually reinterpreted, recast, and reapplied to lend historical legitimacy to a variety of postwar causes and conflicts. “John Brown’s Body,” on the other hand, failed to break free of its radical antislavery connotations and thus remained forever tied to divisive issues of race and civil strife. As a result, the “Battle Hymn” survived into the twentieth century as the foremost musical anthem of Civil War memory while “John Brown’s Body,” once the most popular Civil War song, was increasingly relegated to relative obscurity. Through a thorough examination of the histories of these two songs, this thesis aims to shed light on the significance of radicalism, race, religion, exceptionalism, millennialism, nationalism, and popular memory within American history.
